[LINUX] xbmc server: possible quick implementation?

j1nx Wrote:Just to let you guys know. Now this little thing is at the point I will jump in aswell. I need this "main" xbmc install at my server for updating my MySQL library and to be notified by CP and SB.

Updating now works!
CPU is getting lower!

Perfect, for me. I will try it out and offcourse get back to you with any issues I might run into.

And a few Q-s:
1. I do not really understand why is the above complication necessary. If I understood correctly, the server-mode is just a flag somewhere. Deactivate it, use the GUI to configure plugins and reactivate it; no need install different versions and copy files around.
2. How about providing a simpler solution for people who do not want (or cant) to compile XBMC!? Also IIUC, you are only changing the main executable here, maybe a few libs. How about providing just those for a few server platforms; say Windows, Ubuntu and Unraid (actually, the Ubuntu version may be enough and work on most Linux platforms).

1. I don't have any GUI on my server OS, so I can't do that (text mode only server)
2. Compiling your own executable is not so hard, see wiki. All required softwares are free (even for Windows compile)

prot Wrote:First of all many thx for this, I was looking for such a solution for ages. And a suggestion, you can tag this thread with "headless" so it can be easily found under http://forum.xbmc.org/tags.php?tag=headless

feel free to add the tag yourself

prot Wrote:1. I do not really understand why is the above complication necessary. If I understood correctly, the server-mode is just a flag somewhere. Deactivate it, use the GUI to configure plugins and reactivate it; no need install different versions and copy files around.

the point is to install this on a server that won't have the graphical layer installed. if it's already installed as such, go for it. but for most people running this, it'll be on a headless server so you'll mostly be configuring it via ssh, and therefore won't have the capability of running the gui. that's sort of the point of this solution

prot Wrote:2. How about providing a simpler solution for people who do not want (or cant) to compile XBMC!? Also IIUC, you are only changing the main executable here, maybe a few libs. How about providing just those for a few server platforms; say Windows, Ubuntu and Unraid (actually, the Ubuntu version may be enough and work on most Linux platforms).

again, if you want to do this, go for it. however, this was a thread to inform people of a potential code change that would provide this functionality, and it's now grown into an actual solution with a series of code changes in git that people can use. the hope is that the patch will be included in the mainline master branch of the code once eden is released and future versions of xbmc will have this built in by default. however, should the dev team decide not to make use of this, the only way to have it work will be to manually pull down the source, apply the patch, and compile it yourself. and, quite frankly, if you're not up to the task of compiling xbmc for yourself, then you probably shouldn't be running this patch in the first place!

Thx for the fast answers everyone. New here, and I thought only the thread owner can add tags.
Like everyone else here I hope this change will make it into the main branch; won't bet on that though, it is still quite a hack. Providing some binaries will help it spread and maybe the devs will take notice and implement a clean&official XBMC server version.

prot Wrote:Thx for the fast answers everyone. New here, and I thought only the thread owner can add tags.
Like everyone else here I hope this change will make it into the main branch; won't bet on that though, it is still quite a hack. Providing some binaries will help it spread and maybe the devs will take notice and implement a clean&official XBMC server version.

relatively new poster on here myself, to be honest. just got bored of waiting for this to be done by someone else!

not sure that the devs will ever get around to implementing a server version of xbmc as there's masses of work that needs to be done first. i would imagine it would be somewhere after the qt version of the interface, to be honest: just not a high enough priority when visual impact is what's needed more than back-end utility.

absolute worst-case scenario is that this can be maintained relatively easily by merging the upstream changes as and when they happen. for now, i'll wait and see whether the devs accept it into the mainline code before i start worrying about having to provide a server version. of course, like i said, if you want to provide them yourself, feel free: i only started this off, but it belongs to all of us, and i'm not going to get precious about it

This is amazing! I've been turning around this idea in my head for a while too, but never found the time to actually try it out.
It would be extremely useful in my case. Even though I only have one XBMC machine. The PC itself is continuously on and contains auto downloaders like Sickbeard and CouchPotato, but I don't want to run XBMC continuously. In fact I only want to run it when the tv connected to the pc is on, because XBMC running with GUI takes up a lot of resources and consumes a lot of power, which I think is wasteful. Think ecological, people!

In my current setup I run XBMC for an hour every week and let it do a cleanup and update of the library to keep up to date by ways of a cron job. Therefore I cannot enable such nice features as Sickbeard and CouchPotato live updating my collection when something is finished. Additionally I store my library in a Mysql database for which I have a few maintenance scripts too. (like finding videos that accidentally didn't get added to the library and finding videos that got moved before XBMC removes them and adds them to the library again which destroys their chronological ordering)

A headless version would be a great solution for a lot of my problems!

Now, what would be very cool if the GUI and services could be separated and run next to each other. So that I can leave the services running continuously, and when I want to watch TV I just startup the GUI, which connects to the already running services. But that would probably mean a lot of redesign.
I think I will try this out when I find the time, and if it works settle for a solution that stops the headless version and starts the gui version when necessary.

Great work! Just wanted to give you a heads up that there are indeed some people who are interested in this.